Alex' comment below brought to the fore inability to summarise, thanks for that Alex. Here's a summary:

a, 'real-life' works perfectly without points

{i.e. all of the supposed benefits of 'points' are trivially achieved in a situation without points, and this is a completely obvious aspect of human interaction}.

b, all the everyday major pro-sumption sites works perfectly without points

{i.e. all of the supposed benefits of 'points' are trivially achieved in a situation without points, and this is a completely obvious aspect of human interaction}.

c. all the everyday major pro-sumption sites shy away from points because of the problems points create [for example, on SO]

{a few comments have been made: "who cares what the biggest most successful X does?!". In any field, the thinking "who cares what the biggest most successful X does?!" is puerile. If the SO "points experiment" was a huge success, we'd be saying the other guys have screwed up, indeed they would have changed already.}

d, no points ==> all the problems of points eliminated. (obviously enough)

e, SO is amazingly moribund, it should on principle consider BIG changes to fix the points problem, rather than considering tinkering. {there is a twin benefit; fixing the problem AND fixing the moribundness per se.}

(A) "There are no points in real life" but it's easy in real life to know who is worth listening to.

Ask a technical question on any QA site and it's completely obvious who has a clue, even if everyone's totally anonymous. Think about experts you admire in your own speciality. When I see a post by a top expert (example if you're not a graphics programmer), the person certainly doesn't need a "112k" after their name to obviously be a leading expert.

(C) SO is, obviously, a company that makes money to pay salaries from prosumption, like other huge commercial operations such as tripadvisor.com.

Those other "prosumption-coms" of course, obviously, shy away from "points" (again, tripadvisor, amazon, youtube etc - many of the major properties of our era) - often at worst they will do something like indicate that a user has contributed N reviews. On trip advisor I'm a "top reviewer" ("yellow star!") and that's as close as they get to the geeky madness of points. On amazon they strongly discourage any back and fore in comments, and so on.

NOTE if you're not familiar with Toffler's term "prosumption" - one of the basic business models of the today: a company actually tricks the con-sumers in to being pro-ducers of the company's wealth - here: Toffler explains Prosumption (Amazingly, he coined the term before it actually happened.)

(D) All of the many abuses of, problems with, and indeed the flat out hokey wankyness of "points!" would be eliminated at a stroke.

(E) And perhaps the most important point......

almost on principal, change is good: major shake-ups (disruptions, disintermediations) are how the internet should work.

SO is now moribund, like any Western Democracy. (Humorous evidence - recently, almost unbelievably - like a cliché - the SO organisation was having a serious discussion about tinkering with the design on the profile page - "how big should the logo be?!" and so on, exactly like any late-stage failing megacorp. So funny it's not even funny.)

At small, fast moving companies (especially doctom startups), the whole mission can be changed on a dime. In the very early days of SO this sort of conversation could have happened ... "What to do about this points stuff? Let's try totally turning it off for a few months, like at other prosumptions. I'll change the database now and we'll see what happens..."

Contention Recap:

a) There are no points in real life. You can instantly tell who's an expert.

b) Prosumption corps are a major, obvious, and now well-understood part of today's economy. It's a basic of prosumption corps that you avoid points systems like the plague.

c) Tinkering at the edges of any problem is incredibly boring and unsexy.

Contention - totally and completely eliminate points on SO.

Footnote - every meta on SO that suggest radical change, gets heavily downvoted.

This is part of the phenomenon of SO being incredibly moribund, and, points-oriented users.

I believe this post is the most extreme suggestion ever made on SO (any other candidates?)

Note - this post is about eliminating "user points". As discussed with AD7 below,

Regarding voting on answers, that is unrelated to users having points. Allowing anyone to "thumb up" anything is an absolutely basic aspect of any site on the internet today, of any prosumption site from youtube to Facebook to amazon. (Note that it is the actual logo of Facebook.) It's how the internet and social interaction works.

The anomaly of SO having "user points!" is a (you might as well say childish, "geeky", hokey) exceptionalism in the prosumtion internet industry.

"Point-less Stackoverflow" technical challenge!

Even though no other major prosumer businesses have points systems, there are a number of sensible "pro" arguments for points systems. (Example, "enables moderation", etc.) Below, a couple blokes suggest one benefit of a points system is "on a question, knowing who is worth listening to." I feel this is really odd as it's a fundamental human talent (rooted in language and social skills) to be able to trivially do that superbly.

The "scientific proof" would be making a web page version of SO where all names are masked by an XXXX. Perhaps some web-genius can do this.

(TBC, in my opinion it's pointless setting out to "prove" this as it's fully obvious, but there you go.)

One of the great strengths of SO/SE is its bottom-up, earned-privileges community moderation (editing in particular). How do you propose that fit in with the elimination of reputation?
–
Josh CaswellMay 19 '14 at 7:40

@josh - wikipedia works "fairly well" and any anonymous anyone can edit anything. right? secondly; what you're saying is in some ways not real: I see no editing to speak of on SO. where's the editing? people sometimes vote to close, that's about it, and the whole process is miserable. what other "earned privileges" are you referring to? what?
–
Joe BlowMay 19 '14 at 7:44

26

One of the most annoying things to deal with on the internet in general are people who can clearly and convincingly express a bad opinion/advice. The rep system is one factor in allowing users who don't know each other personally to determine who to listen to; and it's self-correcting since persistently touting bad/wrong advice or answers doesn't result in long term reputation to fool new users; and users who've put the effort in to accumulate a sizable reputation usually have advice worth listening to and act accordingly if proven wrong.
–
AD7sixMay 19 '14 at 7:44

6

I'm afraid this is totally wrong AD7. On the contrary, I often see technical posts that are totally wrong made on SO by people who chase high points. Conversely it's commonplace to see excellent expert advice from someone who is clearly an expert, who has no interest in the site or points.
–
Joe BlowMay 19 '14 at 7:46

5

I only need to find (and boy would that be easy) one post which is totally right to contradict that POV; I didn't say all long-standing users on SO are right. You do see users who demonstrate they are experts in their field and have low rep - are they the rule or the exception? (rhetorical). Are they disadvantaged by the points system (sort of - but only in that their activity is restricted/moderated)? Are other user losing out because of the points system affecting this minority (IMO no)?
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AD7sixMay 19 '14 at 7:48

2

I'm not really sure what that means =). When I'm booking a room I'm not listening to someone ask a question or reading their answers - where's the connection? Anyway: If there was no reputation there'd be no need or motivation to vote on questions and answers. If there were no votes on questions and answers - how can users broadly identify good/bad questions or compare answers?
–
AD7sixMay 19 '14 at 8:00

12

the universe's social media ("you've heard of Facebook! wikipedia!" etc) is utterly packed with presumption content, no points involved; - praise the lord SO&Family is not a social media. Congratulations for the unpopular post of the week!
–
brasofiloMay 19 '14 at 8:13

3

My points are not wanky. So you can't have them.
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slugsterMay 19 '14 at 8:17

1

@brasofilo ... (1) SO is social media. (2) SO is a prosumption site. A social media business, or presumption business, makes money from, consumers creating content. The raison d'etre of stack overflow or youtube or tripadvisor, is that, you can make money from consumers creating content. There is no other purpose or reason for the existence of these things. (For sure, wikipedia is different because it is charitable, as I understand it. The principal is the same.)
–
Joe BlowMay 19 '14 at 8:17

3

I'm by far not a "points-oriented" user but still downvoted your question. While you're right that there are many users who got their points by farming easy questions and are far from being experts (e.g. there's a recent 10k user in the python tag who's good at entry-level things but has little to no knowledge of more advanced topics), simply removing rep doesn't solve the underlying issues (one of which is people that have no clue getting upvoted by people having even less of a clue). Also, we tie moderation privileges to rep; without it, you'd have to invent a completely new scheme for this.
–
l4mpiMay 19 '14 at 8:25

1

braso - gamification is silly, so get rid of it. we're all engineers trying to build stuff to feed our families. using that ridiculous word ("gamification!") is ridiculously appropriate, just get rid of it: it's plain silly. l4mpi , there are zero advantages to what you say: see the five points in my post up top, "case closed".
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Joe BlowMay 19 '14 at 9:36

8

"there are zero advantages to what you say" - That's my line. You fail to make a compelling argument that eliminating rep would improve anything, except for "they (FB/Wiki/etc) do it too" and "all these rep problems will be gone" (which ones? IMO most things you could cite here are problems with the userbase/newbies, not with rep). And please NEVER use Wikipedia as an example of a good community as it has tons of problems and is also dominated by petty arguments about deletion and what's not noteworthy - guess what, influential musicians are not considered noteworthy, but 2 girls 1 cup is.
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l4mpiMay 19 '14 at 9:49

4

"There are no points in real life. You can instantly tell who's an expert." - Interesting. What is your plan to proof that hypothesis?
–
JensGMay 19 '14 at 15:22

2

HOLY! I now have TWO UP VOTES !! AND A TICKLE :) thx
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Joe BlowMay 19 '14 at 16:16

9

"There are no points in real life. You can instantly tell who's an expert." Did you proofread this? That can't be what you meant to write.
–
Bill the Lizard♦May 20 '14 at 3:44

2 Answers
2

This statement is so obviously false that it's ridiculous. Sure, if you're an expert you can tell who else is, but that ignores everyone else in the world. We're not just here to help other experts.

Even though no other major prosumer businesses have points systems...

This statement is also false. Reddit has karma points. Even if it were true, that statement would be irrelevant. The fact that Stack Exchange is doing something different than Facebook and YouTube is not necessarily a bad thing.

Finally, points on Stack Exchange are not just used to tell who is an expert in a particular topic. That's not even their primary purpose. Reputation points track your participation in the community and unlock privileges.

.. for a psychological-test "proof" of such a basic, central, human skill as how well we judge expertise by evidence of arcane knowledge, language skills, command of detailed facts .. you'd do this: make the QA pages presented with all the names removed. Like when you do a blind tasting with the bottle in a sleeve..
–
Joe BlowMay 20 '14 at 14:21

16

@JoeBlow Yes, I read that the first time. Repeating it doesn't make it any more relevant. Just because you can pick which flavor you like best in a blind taste test, doesn't mean you can tell what answer is correct on a programming site. Everyone has taste buds and knows how to use them. That doesn't make them wine experts.
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Bill the Lizard♦May 20 '14 at 14:57

Check out that awesome gravatar! Uh, that was simply an example of doing a "blind test". ("blind tests" are common, as you know, in psychological testing.) I'll edit it out. I just repeated what I said, since you just repeated what you said. the problem is we have two competing "it's just obvious"s. My thought experiment of doing an obvious psychological test, points, how obviously obvious out how obviously obvious, uh, my obvious is. (Your latest comment that non-experts don't have this ability, is also (obviously!) way wrong - heh.)
–
Joe BlowMay 20 '14 at 15:41

9

@JoeBlow I didn't just repeat what I wrote earlier, I greatly expanded on it. This isn't just a case of two competing "it's obvious" statements. Your suppositions are easily refuted with counterexamples. There's absolutely no basis for your claims.
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Bill the Lizard♦May 20 '14 at 15:45

Hmm, if you're talking about the "humans can easily tell who's an expert" issue: The expanded information you've added is (A) that to you, your view is "obvious". And (B) you've raised the concept that "non-experts" can't tell who has a clue. {Do you now agree with me then, that, experts can trivially tell who has a clue?) Secondly (on an other point), you mention Reddit (excellent example), in contrast in contrast to my examples (facebook, amazon, etc). In your final para. you repeat what I already mentioned in the comments.
–
Joe BlowMay 20 '14 at 16:35

1

@JoeBlow I never tried to refute that an expert can tell who has a clue. In fact, I already said "Sure, if you're an expert you can tell who else is..."
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Bill the Lizard♦May 20 '14 at 21:37

@JoeBlow: it's hard for people with no expertise to recognize experts (that's the whole point behind snake-oil vendors). You should read, in particular, about the Dunning-Kruger effect.
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ninjaljMay 28 '14 at 15:11

1

@JoeBlow The wine tasting analogy is a false one. People can tell what wine they enjoy tasting, not which wine is more expensive, or which wine is considered by the wine community to be better, or which wine contains antifreeze. Similarly, when two people who both know more than you do about a topic are arguing, it can be very difficult to know who is right, and who is simply willing to say anything to seem right, or who is simply more eloquent, or who is better at quoting documentation out of context.
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Parthian ShotJun 5 '14 at 14:47

This is an interesting proposal. I actually agree, and voted up. Points are necessary for the underlying privilege system, but we really don't need them displayed on the page.

Just the other day, I did my duty and told somebody who left unconstructive comments to please stop. They told me, "You have 131 points. Come back when you have 20,000". Really? I had to post the FAQ entry on comments to get the guy to shut up. I had been a member of that SE site for 7 months at that point.

Voting up answers is good. That's a good use of "democracy". But giving publicly visible credit for answers only encourages gaming and elitism.